Win XP looking for non-existent disk drive

This is a discussion on Win XP looking for non-existent disk drive within the Windows XP Support forums, part of the Tech Support Forum category. Hi. I have an older machine running WinXP. Since it has only 40GB disk drive, I installed some non-critical programs

Hi. I have an older machine running WinXP. Since it has only 40GB disk drive, I installed some non-critical programs on an external USB disk drive (drive F). As an example, I installed Adobe Acrobat on the external drive. Well, the external drive crashed, and no data can be recovered. Now when I try to reinstall the programs I lost (onto my C drive this time), they default to the external drive and won't install to C- I guess because my computer thinks the programs are still there. I can't delete the 'missing' programs using add/remove programs..it says the drive is unavailable. Can anyone tell me how to get around this problem? Can I solve this by doing a windows repair? Thanks.

Yes, I did lose a few other programs...like iTunes, real arcade, and world of warcraft (my husband did NOT like that!). Was able to reinstall some of them on c, but not others. Is there any way to get rid of all these 'missing' program links in add/remove programs? Or do I just need to start fresh and reinstall windows? I'm assuming there's something in the registry that's pointing to the other disk for those programs, and I don't know if I'm up to messing with that.